Valve announced its new SteamOS operating system today. SteamOS is geared toward the living room and television set. Valve also promises that it will be available as a free download soon, I'm looking forward to checking it out.

The company notes that it is working to include music, TV and movies in SteamOS. And it notes that family sharing, in-home streaming and family options will also eventually be part of its new operating system.

Finally, you don’t have to give up your favorite games, your online friends, and all the Steam features you love just to play on the big screen. SteamOS, running on any living room machine, will provide access to the best games and user-generated content available.

In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we’re now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases.

I have to wonder how this will affect Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony over the long term. Will SteamOS challenge Playstation, Nintendo and XBox in the living room? It's really too early to tell, there's far too much we don't know about SteamOS.

But take very careful note of that second paragraph in the snippet from the article. It sounds like Valve is polishing SteamOS carefully to get the maximum amount of graphics and overall performance from any hardware that runs SteamOS. This could be very bad for Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony if it's a precursor to a Steam Box for the living room.

I'd at least be wondering and I'd possibly be a bit worried if I were an executive at Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo. The traditional consoles have already been swamped by the explosion in mobile device gaming (plus it's onslaught of cheaper but very fun games), and now here comes Valve to drive another nail in their coffin with SteamOS.

Linux and Asteroid Mining

Just when you thought that Linux had filled every niche possible, ZDNet has a story about Linux being used for asteroid mining. Yes, asteroid mining. Talk about out taking Linux out of this world!